Mitterrand told Thatcher: United Germany might allow another Hitler

President Mitterrand of France warned Margaret Thatcher privately that a reunited Germany might “make even more ground than Hitler had” only a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, newly declassified documents reveal.

In papers due to be published by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office tomorrow, after a year of deliberation by Whitehall officials, the scale of Anglo-French fears on German reunification is laid bare.

At a lunch at the Élysée Palace on January 20, 1990, Charles, now Lord, Powell, the then foreign affairs adviser to Mrs Thatcher reports in a memo that Mr Mitterrand talked about how reunification would cause the re-emergence of the “bad” Germans who dominated Europe.

According to the memo, Mr Mitterrand said at one point that if Helmut Kohl, the Chancellor of West Germany at the time, were to get his way, a unified Germany could win more ground than Hitler ever did and that Europe would have to bear the consequences.

Mr Mitterrand warned Mrs Thatcher that if Germany were to expand territorially, Europe would be back to where it had been one year before the First World War.